


Growing Pains

by gemstonecircles



Series: Lions and Lambs [3]
Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Body insecurity, F/M, FT what FT, Fluff, Fortune Cookies, Moving, first apartments, no beta we die like men, work brought to you by a venti to the dome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-19 00:49:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29866632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gemstonecircles/pseuds/gemstonecircles
Summary: Prompt # 19 Fortune CookieSet about 5 or 6 years after EW. Everyone has something that they are sensitive about, especially when you are all growing up together.
Relationships: Relena Peacecraft/Heero Yuy
Series: Lions and Lambs [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2189268
Comments: 10
Kudos: 18
Collections: Love Reflection March Madness (2021)





	Growing Pains

“Are you …doing okay today?” Relena asked, spearing an errant sprout of broccoli with a chopstick and peeking up at Heero from under her fringe. They were eating take-away at the coffee table of his new apartment, sitting on the floor while a few meager boxes were stacked around the studio. She had been delighted Heero had announced the move. He had spent the previous handful of years in the Preventers dormitories and, as he was the last to move out, it was past time that he allowed himself to grow into his own space. 

There was such a lack of normalcy in their lives, such a history of pain, trauma, and adolescent upended. They had all been forced into positions that none of them had been prepared to take at an age when they should have been responsible for nothing more than the business of becoming themselves. In that overturned sequence of life, in the gaping void that was their childhood and innocence, and the small things, the rituals, the guideposts, the transitions of a normal young life, had become unutterably precious. Relena found that she was hungry to savor each one, even if it meant heaving boxes of wires and electronics, computer parts, and old-fashioned, printed manuals up five flights of stairs. Moving into one’s first apartment was a graduation, and she would be damned if she missed helping Heero across that stage. 

He had had predictably few boxes, but those he did have were both heavy _and_ fragile, and she was secretly afraid that one might explode if she bumped it against a wall.

“These aren’t light,” he’d warned as they loaded Howard’s borrowed truck after work, “You don’t have to help.”

“I’m stronger than I look,” she’d replied primly, rolling up the sleeves of her pink jumper and eagerly starting to unload.

* * *

By the time they had finished, she completely regretted her enthusiasm, but she made him set up the small, flat-pack coffee table that she had brought as a present and ordered a feast of Chinese food. 

“I don’t have two plates,” he’d muttered as she dialed the number. She turned back to silence him with a finger against his mouth.

“Tradition says that we eat out of the boxes,” she’d whispered, before shifting into her low, mature Telephone Voice to make the order.

Heero had been taciturn all day, even more than usual. His brow furrowed a bit deeper, and he was hunched in on himself in a way that she remembered him doing in his younger years. Her cheer felt a bit forced, but she was determined that nothing would ruin this small island of normal, even if, on Monday, she would return to her office and he would return to uniform and the business of keeping the world safe. For one afternoon, one evening, they could just be a young woman helping her boyfriend move into his first apartment.

She had tried several times to prompt him into conversation, but she had at first been so ravenous, devouring her Sweet and Sour Tofu absorbed her focus and she had put aside his strange mood. But as she tucked into the box of Beef and Broccoli, she started to feel increasingly uneasy. Even at the best of times, Heero could never be called loquacious, was prone to silence and brooding, but this moodiness seemed deeper, focused inwards and approaching a cloud of depression.

Relena tried again, clearing her throat and sighing exaggeratedly, “I think those might have been too heavy for me after all. Maybe we should have gotten Trowa to help us out.”

Heero, gazing intently into his General Tso’s Chicken, snapped his chopsticks in half.

Relena sat back, eyes wide. After a moment, she stirred, gently placed her food on the table, chopsticks stuck in the box, manners be damned, and knelt up to crawl around the table until she was beside him. She carefully leaned her body flush against the hunched length of his back, wrapping her arms around his chest. She sat there for a moment, focusing on wiry muscles and sharp, strong angles, willing his breaths to deepen with her own, trying to blanket him with affection. She closed her eyes, her head tucked against his shoulder and felt him beginning to relax a little, muscle fibre by muscle fibre. 

“You don’t have to tell me what’s wrong,” she whispered, “but you can. Tell me anything. No matter what.”

They sat together in silence for one minute, then two.

“Annual physicals were today,” Heero muttered, finally.

Relena felt the panic rising up in her stomach, bile and terror, and tried forcefully not to let her mind run through any of the terrible scenarios that could have caused his distress, “Oh?”

Heero was silent for a long, long time. Then he heaved a sigh and let his head fall, scrubbing his hand through his hair.

“I haven’t grown,” he said finally, staring into the middle distance.

“How do you mean?” Relena lifted her head to look at him, to note all the ways that she noticed that he definitely _had_ grown, sharp angles of face and jaw, the shadow of facial hair, the corded muscles of his neck.

“Everyone else is getting taller. Bigger. When we were kids, with the Gundams,” he ran a hand through his hair again, “Being small didn’t used to matter. It was good. Efficient.”

“I wouldn’t say that you’re _small,_ ” Relena started, but he cut her off.

“Trowa hit 190 cm. Everyone just grew so much. And I didn’t.”

“Well, first, Trowa is _huge_ , and it’s a good thing he came to the Preventers or the circus would have had to replace the tightrope with marine cord,” Relena replied, wrapping her arms tighter around Heero’s slim waist. “At least you didn’t have poor Duo’s luck. He’s been all arms and legs for the last few years. And when Quatre’s voice cracked? That was _awful_ , poor thing. You grew so gracefully.”

“I grew 3 centimeters, total. _You_ are taller than me,” he bit out.

“Not by much. I don’t mind. I don’t like high heels anyway.”

“Your adoring public wouldn’t agree. They think you need a White Knight; Tall and handsome.”

“They will think,” said Relena, kissing his tanned, freckled shoulder, noticing the hard muscle and wondering how, _how_ _on Earth,_ he could be so blind to his own physicality, “that I have an extremely sexy and exceptionally capable boyfriend who also happens to be a Preventer and looks _amazing_ in his uniform. And if they don’t think that, why would I care? The opinions of madmen mean nothing to me.”

“Why are you so… _you_ about everything?” he growled at her, but she could feel the hard line in his neck softening, leaning in her direction, following the touch of her hand. She reached out her other hand, humming. There was something addictive about having him let her comb her fingers through his hair, touch his shoulders and back, arching slightly with the deceptive docility of a relaxing jungle cat. 

  
“Let’s look at our fortunes,” she whispered, leaning against him, “maybe it will cheer you up. We can always add ‘in bed’ if they aren’t good.”

“You sound like Duo,” he groused, tossing one to her.

“Where do you think I learned that game?” she laughed, breaking open the cookie and popping it into her mouth.

She looked down at her fortune and snorted around a full mouth, “Oh no, these are the really terribly translated ones that make no sense! I got ‘good as strawberries.’ That’s a terrible fortune.”

“You can have mine,” Heero said glumly, sliding the small cookie across the coffee table. 

Relena shrugged, broke it open, and snorted into her hand. 

“Heero, you really need this fortune.”

“I don’t want it.” 

“No, I _really_ think this is an important fortune,” Relena managed, giggling as she held the small paper between two fingers and turned to try and twist her way under his arm and into his lap. He didn’t move his arm, but he did turn his head, still glowering, so that she could more easily pepper small, teasing kisses under his jaw, in front of his ear, tracing the dark freckles across his nose. He tried to keep frowning, but pecks grew into kisses, and kisses grew deeper, until they were wrapped up in one another, all hands and mouths, tongues and ragged breaths.

“You really, really need to read this,” she gasped as he nipped at her lower lip, pressed a long kiss to the throb of pulse in her neck, “because it’s maybe the best fortune I’ve ever read.”

“How,” he murmured, fully focused on gathering her closer into his lap, kissing her harder. He had his hands under her jumper, spanning across her back, calloused fingertips dragging slowly across her soft skin and reeling her closer in. 

“Accuracy,” she managed before lifting her arms to let him tug the jumper over her head. She let her hands fall back to bury them in his hair, fortune still tucked in the crook of her thumb, tipping his head to find the perfect angle to press her lips against his forehead, nose, chin, biting at the sensitive hollow of his neck and finally returning to lock onto his mouth. At length, she pulled her red, swollen lips from his.

“… you _do_ have a mattress, I seem to remember,” she whispered, “unless it was too tiring carrying it up here. It’s awfully big.”

The last furrow in his brow smoothed as he grinned and easily tossed her backwards onto the bed as she shrieked and giggled. A tiny white slip of paper flew from her hands and drifted to the floor, forgotten. 

It read “small but very hot.”

**Author's Note:**

> I am in love with the idea of small, lithe adult Heero. Also I got both of these fortune cookie fortunes. Best. Fortunes. Ever.


End file.
